I always advocate trying new things, with the aim of packing as wide a range of experiences possible into this life. Not necessarily going skydiving or any such radical activity, but taking on small challenges within my day-to-day tasks can throw up attempting the unknown. In the second year of my degree, I'm being made to read Hegel. Notoriously hard, I didn't expect my first reading of his Phenomenology of Spirit to throw up wonders.The only baking task on par with this had to be my first ever go at cheesecake. I adapted a New York baked vanilla cheesecake recipe from the M&S Recipe Keeper to use less cream cheese, and used a vanilla pod instead of essence, another first. I don't even like cheesecake myself this much, so as with when I picked up my Hegel reading, I didn't have the highest of expectations.
Ingredients:
3 large free range eggs
lemon juice
100ml single cream
40gg cream cheese
1 vanilla pod
150g digestive biscuits
100g butter
1 tbsp granulated sugar
100g plain flour
200g caster sugar
For the base: Crush the digestives; my preferred method is bagging them then bashing the bag angrily with a rolling pin. Melt the butter and add the initial tablespoon of sugar and the digestive crumbs. Press the mixture into the base of a greased or silicon cake tin, smoothing with the back of a spoon. Bake this for ten minutes only on gas mark 4.
Beat the scraped contents of a vanilla pod (or essence) into the cream cheese.
Whisk the eggs, lemon juice and cream in a jug.
Add half of this to the cream cheese, followed by the flour and sugar, then the other half of the jug mixture. Pour carefully onto the pre-cooked digestive base. It is key that the base has had time to cool and set. mine didn't hence half the base floated to the top (which is less of a disaster retrospectively, but not as aesthetically pleasing as the half where all the base stayed where it should).
Bake for 15 minutes only on gas mark 6, then turn it down to gas 1/2 and leave in for about 40 minutes. Allow to cool, then refrigerate the cheesecake for 2 hours to let it set.
Okay. so it ain't beautiful, but I'll concede without any modesty that it actually tastes great, and I never like cheesecake in restaurants, etc. Baked cheesecake having been conquered, time to return to Hegel, still having no idea what on earth he means by the Absolute.
